Anthropology has shown the importance of storytelling in the construction of collective identity in human societies: telling stories activates a performative mechanism that allows us to anchor ourselves and identify with shared references. Throughout the process that goes from the articulation of those first stories to the construction of an official history, however, there is a tendency to lose sight of the embodied aspect of those narratives, that is, the way in which they emerge from—and circulate through—subjective corporealities, continually reinterpreting and reconfiguring themselves.
This exhibition aims to identify the presence of micro-histories and themes that unite a selection of Chilean artworks from the last 50 years. Some of these works already belong to the national canon, while others, more recent, are still in the process of being told and read. All of them, however, share an embodied sensibility, revealing the existence of poetic and affective ties that transcend temporal and generational boundaries. Without necessarily opposing official history, these works problematize and complicate established conceptions of corporeality, gender, desire, family, and the domestic, thus opening themselves up to more fluid readings.
The joint examination of these works becomes a subjective experience open to the viewer’s interpretations, whose physical and emotional presence temporarily completes these embodied stories.
